Abraham as you may never have known him before

Moses encounters the burning bush, Jacob dreams of a ladder ascending to heaven. But remarkably, the Torah says nothing about how Abraham, traditionally the founder of monotheism, discovered it.

For millennia, in midrash and commentaries, rabbis stepped into the narrative vacuum, filling in the missing early life of the first patriarch. In that tradition of creative interpretation comes a bold new biography by Professor Anthony Julius, hailed by the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, as “a masterpiece”.

For Julius, Abraham is the origin of a dichotomy that runs through Judaism, between faith and critical reason, between the person who challenges received wisdom and the person with a strong belief in Providence. He calls them Abraham 1 and Abraham 2.

Since first coming across Abraham “in a cartoon strip version” as a child, he has been fascinated by the story of “the first Jew”. “I always had a sense from early adulthood that it might be interesting to write a book about Abraham,” he explained in his Hampstead office overflowing with books - which share a sofa with him and congregate on the stairs.

But the opportunity for Julius - whose previous books include a study of T.S.Eliot and antisemitism, and a history of antisemitism in England - did not arrive until he was asked to contribute to Yale’s Jewish Lives, a series of a hundred published or forthcoming volumes, ranging from King David to Bob Dylan.

He was invited to write a biography of an American judge but didn’t fancy the commission and instead proposed Abraham. The result, which took two years to write, is part philosophical reflection, part literary analysis but also includes something more: a retelling of some of the seminal episodes of the Abraham story.

“I could have written a standard, academic-style book with a critical examination of sources,” he said. “But I thought it would be more interesting to try my hand at something I hadn’t tried before, which is something a little more novelistic with character, incident, action and dialogue.”

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His method was to “stay faithful to the Jewish tradition” but “elaborate” on it,” producing what is in part “a midrash on the Midrash”. He drew on Maimonides’s portrait of Abraham as a thinker whose contemplation of the workings of the universe led him to reject the polytheistic myths of his society and deduce the idea of a single Creator. This is Abraham 1, the freewheeling intellectual whose iconoclasm is literal; according to the Midrash, he takes a hammer to the idols in his father Terah’s shop.

Julius said a comment by Naimonides had “made me wonder why the Torah does not address Abraham’s early life. After all, it does address Moses’s early life. And the answer he gives is that the Torah does not wish to concern itself with idolatry.

“I thought it’s a good question but perhaps not the best answer. Maybe it is because the Torah did not want to address that mode of Jewish activity, which was self-interrogating and fully independent-minded. The Torah is more about relations between God and Israel where the Jews have adopted a position of faith, of subordination…

“I thought, looking at the Jewish world today, this relative discomfort with independent thinking, with challenges and all the rest of it, maybe it is a discomfort that started at the very beginning of Judaism.”

When King Nimrod, who accuses Abraham of trying to undermine the authority of the kingdom, orders him to be cast into the fiery furnace, Abraham prays to God; and when he is spared from the flames, he undergoes a religious transformation. Hitherto, he has been a “rational deist”, whose God may have brought the world into being but thereafter remains detached from His Creation.

Now he embraces the reality of a personal God who is able to commune with him, the man of faith who goes out in the world attracting converts - Abraham 2.

But the climax of this phase, the Akedah, the near-sacrifice of his son Isaac, is no triumphant test of faith. The event is a catastrophe that leaves Abraham in “spiritual disarray”. The God he thought he knew as a friend has been revealed as an inexplicable, inscrutable Being.

Abraham overlooking the smoking remains of Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis, Chapter 19, 27-28). Woodcut after a drawing by Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld (1794 - 1872)Getty Images

When the Torah says that Abraham died of “a good old age” and “full of years”, Julius said, you could infer from that “he had a life full of blessing and reward and comfort,” But that is to ignore what actually happens in the aftermath of the Akedah.

“His wife dies, His contact with his son is only through Eliezer, and he has no further contact with God.

“In order to maintain the positive, upbeat version of Abraham’s last years, you just have to pretend there is no significance in any of those facts. So that involves a larger suppression of the material in the Torah than reinterpreting that one verse, which of course can be read ironically. Or it can be read simply as ‘he got through it, he survived it.’ He himself survived it, even though it was at a great price,” he explained.

“I’ve never been attracted to the upbeat, jolly, positive-thinking kind of version of Abraham’s life - or of Judaism at that matter. There is a certain tendency of rabbis to emphasise the positivity of Jewish life and of every experience - like Dale Carnegie-like people [author of How to Win Friends and Influence People], smiling and cheerful and upbeat.

“They overlook the tragic dimension, the shadow of catastrophe that falls over Jewish life - and I don’t just mean because of antisemitism. There is something inside Judaism that makes it challenging and very difficult.”

Still practising as the most senior solicitor advocate of the law firm Mishcon de Reya, which he has been with for 45 years, he is also professor of law and arts at University College London, where he is teaching a course on Shakespeare to third-year lawyers. He is also working on a book on “free speech for liberals”.

If Julius’s Abraham is an archetype, it is in both aspects. “I don’t think that one can only be an Abraham 1 because then you end up in a kind of nihilistic self-severing from the Jewish community,” he said. “But if you are only an Abraham 2, then you are lost inside of Jewish community and you lose any sense of your own agency.”

Where Abraham was, “there are we. He is the first person who played the game of Judaism and we are playing the game that he defined, still.”

Abraham - The First Jew, Yale University Press, is out now at £16.99.

Anthony Julius will be speaking about it at Jewish Book Week in London on March 9 at 2pm, you can book tickets here.

Also at Book Week Gila Fine will speak on women in the Talmud, Rabbanit Nechama Goldman Barash on women’s sexuality in Jewish law, Professor Marc Shapiro on his new book on Rav Kook and Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove on ‘Being Jewish Today’